The story continues to unfold of Leisha and I journeying out of our past.   This week was the most poignant and difficult for me since I asked her for forgiveness in November of 2012.  You see we have been seeing Bob Hamp as a counselor most of the summer.  It started out as me going to see him after my fathers death to pre-process any potential deep grieving.  I was afraid of going off the deep end so to speak….   I finished that end of June, we did our video through Valley Creek which stirred some things up.  Leisha has had some things going on in her for near a year and we decided it was her turn to see Bob.  She did up until the second week of Sept.  Not a lot of sessions but some very meaningful sessions.  Then he asked us to begin to meet with him as a couple.  On our first session he thought it was best to begin some exercises together and we gladly followed.   Know that with what I am about to describe I am still gladly following and so is Leisha.  We have complete trust in where Bob is taking us,  he knows what is in our hearts for our futures, he made a commitment to me to navigate us through some things albeit I am not sure he knew when he said that he had an “inkling” this week would occur.  Maybe he did….just no idea, but he said what he said about navigating, it stirred me deeply and I am going to hold him to it !!!! 🙂

Bob described that some people take in others pains into themselves and hold them.  They take in others anger and insert themselves between the problems lying under their anger and their pain and take responsibility for that…. Hold all of that themselves.  How that we were not designed to contain those kinds of things and that…. for those kind of people there is a correlation to long term health problems like say, Rheumatoid Arthritis.  The very second he completed that sentence a bolt of lightening went through me.   It contained deep deep deep awareness of more than just having been emotionally and verbally abusive.   I said in my post about rage that it had never come across my mind to hurt her but … here it is in front of me I may have hurt her for decades….

Managing RA has been a cornerstone of our relationship since before we married, 23 years.  I have always been so proud and her so thankful that I have had the ability to financially help her manage her RA with the best medicine and doctors there is available.  We spend over 30k a year right now on insurance and that is mainly due to the cost of her Enbrel.  She has come to me sooo many times in tears about her costing us so much and honestly, that cost has never phased me one bit.  I would goto to the end of the universe to help her with her disease.

Another hall mark of our relationship is that I have always helped her go places with her body she would have never gone before mainly due to her mindset of self protecting her bones and the pain there in.  Riding a Tandem on a self contained ride, 180 miles through the Canadian Rockies.  Snow Skiing countless times at 10 different American Ski Resorts.  Taking her to Romania, touring 2 weeks from bottom to top and back down again.  Countless other things but….  I blindly helped her along the opposite way too.    I can’t describe to you the weight of that realization.  She has a part to play in this Bob encouraged, she takes it in and was probably doing that before me but….. my part, oh my !!!!!!

So for the next 45 minutes he navigated me through telling her everything I have ever done to her in as much detail as I could muster, her telling me she is no longer responsible for A, B, C, …. X, Y, Z…..   He guided her giving that back to me and letting me take responsibility of which I gladly did.   At one point as I was telling her things she pulled her hand away.  She told me later that was so difficult for her to do but she knew she had to take that small step.  We are now exploring her getting angry back at me for doing those things, its difficult for her, I wish it wasn’t.  Another part of me struggles with that, I don’t do well with anyone being angry at me especially her but… I really do trust this process.  More than anything I want a whole wife, partner, friend to walk with and I see that coming and I want to be the same to her.

But that is not all….  The next night at our church’s Thursday night prayer group the theme ends up being processing our past with God our good Father.  As we break into small groupings to discuss that we end up with a dear friend who has been processing already for weeks like I have (except the Leisha side of things), her ex husbands abuse to her many years ago.  He got physical.  She was in tears…. Leisha had to focus on not taking that in….  I was thinking about my past of doing this to our friends, friend… Leisha…. and I have been stuck in this processing ever since.  This seemed to be a form of confirmation of “the season” Leisha and I are in. No  I am quit confident it was.

There is an element of taking this to the cross, not holding onto it, I keep taking it to the cross but its not with a lot of experience of doing that.  I suspect to the heavens I look like a toddler learning to walk.

I have been thinking a lot about responsibility these last few days due to all of this.  Saturday morning I woke up to the memories of my sisters killer.  The young 26 year old woman who killed her, my 6 year old nephew, my 2 month old niece by driving drunk July 4th 1996. She was very very drunk.   I wondered if she still remembers or thinks about that, I am sure she does.   How does she think of it ??  I thought of how when we were going through the court process my family had massive fights over what to charge her with.  The men wanted to hang her, especially my father.  My mother won the day and I saw all of that in a brand new light this morning.  Rather than send her to prison for 10 years she wanted to give her 10 years probation… of which we did end up offering her if she would only plead guilty.  She did, carrying a new born inside of her.  When I described my thoughts to Leisha this morning she asked the question, does she think of whom she killed every time she looks at her child’s face ?  She hoped not and me too now.  That child would be 18 years old.  I saw grace and mercy in my mother for the first time.  That was a profound choice for her to press upon our family and..  she was right, I see that now.  My mother just firmly stood her ground, she was not to be persuaded, for the first time I saw her strength of conviction in a new way.  You see my mother plays a large part into why I became the person I was with Leisha and others too.. maybe all of that is for another blog, but seeing “mom” in these ways is huge for me.   That young woman had enough to bare already….  I pray she is living a life of more abundance… Aliveness that is overwhelming most of the time.

So why the title ?  I suspect Paul’s thorn in the flesh is memories of murder, stoning’s, traveling’s to the next city feeling  so righteous in his actions of helping the sect of the Pharisees bring about the messiah that would finally save the Children of Israel.   Strategizing, giving high 5’s to other like minded zealots after more Christians were killed and “Jesus’s Church” was disrupted in yet another city.  Maybe he felt like it must to hunt down elements of Al Qaeda or ISIS. How could one ever be wrong for that ?????   The kingdom was expanding or at least being protected !!!!   I suspect he saw his past as a back drop where a radical new view of the Jesus Story that was unfolding in him lay against.  A dark back drop like in a theatre that allowed this new view to show so clearly all of its wonderful pieces.   A story that has changed billions and billions of people for 2000 years.  The Pauline Epistles….  I suspect to him those letters mostly felt like a blog post.   Did he know how impactful they would actually be ?  I suspect as he came to know what all we had in Jesus, probably more fully than anyone since,  he like me wanted his past to go away, it just wouldn’t.

Now no one really knows what his thorn in the flesh was, it has been speculated upon for centuries.  But what we do know is when Paul penned his thoughts and inspirations about it he specifically wrote:  “God said my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I wonder if the inspiration to be vague about the details was so that we could more easily insert our own personal details.  Think about it, only a Creator of a Universe could have that kind of foresight to inspire someone to “leave out”, not explain, so as to give purpose to a life time of struggles to some guy alone at 3:00 am on a continent far away, some unthinkable time in the future.

After processing so deeply these last few days how wrong I was, I can’t imagine any physical problem in Paul being worse than something like seeing so clearly how wrong he was in hurting others so blindly.   The kind of blindness I am talking about connotes seeing.  A kind of seeing and knowing  you see everything there is.  Just like that young woman who killed my sister, at some level she knew she could make it safely home but how wrong was she?  Yes her judgment was impaired when she made the decision to make it home on her own after a long day partying on the 4th of July but we all are impaired by something when we hurt blindly.

In spite of the crushing pain I feel, I hope I will always have that to see this phrase to help me turn towards him, “My grace is sufficient for you”.   I do now take full responsibility for what I did.  In-spite of what others did to me to help cause that, in the end it was Me alone.  I AM responsible but his Grace, her grace Oh My !!!!  And if the memory of that has to remain as a backdrop for God’s and Leisha’s Grace towards me “to see”, so be it.    I HAVE injured blindly, in that I recognize so clearly how weak I really am.  May his power be made perfect in my weakness….All of his power !